Training your mindset

Published 5:42 pm, Monday, July 19, 2010

If you are looking to lose weight, no doubt it is difficult to lose if you just exercise or just diet. It has to be both.

Think of it as a tag-team approach. When it comes to changing your diet, education is the key.

In my nutrition education toolbox, the great tool is the diet history, when you write down everything you eat for a week, how much and at when.

I can usually suggest three or four minor changes to add up to a significant change. Heading to the grocery store as an educated consumer is a great tool for people on the path to change.

"When you go to the store, you have to know what's good and what's not. And you have to check your cupboards, too," said Danbury's Yvette Ledesma. She is on the path to good health and is working with Palmer Collier, a Brookfield personal trainer.

"I say `Let me take you shopping' and we go to the store," he said. "There really is an art form to shopping healthy."

Most important is to read and interpret labels. Two great websites for that include www.fda.gov -- click on food -- and at kidshealth.org.

"The key to losing weight permanently is to create a lifestyle. I will go shopping, go through their cabinets and even visit their workplace because people have a lot of subconscious habits they don't even know they are doing," Collier said. "It's a change in thinking and it can be done. It's getting on the right track."

Ledesma said she is on the right track and, in a month, has lost about 10 pounds.

"You can exercise all you want but you have to have the nutrition side of it," she said.

Collier calls it "Mind your Body," which is his lifestyle program for nutrition education, exercise and health.

"Everyone is seeing a difference in me," Ledesma said. "I can't wait until the end of August to see how I am going to look. I'll be forever grateful to him for helping me."

Collier said you have to be set up for success.

"You have to re-educate yourself about choices and get into the mind set," he said.